> I'm writing to suggest that Xorg's middle-mouse pasting should be an > optional feature, not an unchangeable behavior.
Where are you seeing this Xorg behaviour? If I run "xev" and click the middle mouse button, I only see a "button 2 pressed" event, I don't see any events relating to the clipboard. I don't think Xorg sends any clipboard events by default? Please correct me if I'm wrong but it looks like Xorg isn't the source of this issue. > Say for example a user is writing a document, scrolling through it, > and accidentally pastes text without knowing it. > The pasted text might contain sensitive/private information. > The user submits the document somewhere, and people read it. > It's more likely than you think. For what it's worth, I have been scrolling through documents for decades and never once pasted anything by accident with the middle click. It sounds like your mouse is faulty as every mouse I have ever used has required considerable effort to actuate the middle mouse button, to the point that I have once disassembled my mouse and replaced the microswitch in it for the mouse wheel to make it easier to press. > This isn't simply a matter of mouse scroll wheels that click too > easily. Laptop touchpads are known to paste accidentally too. I've also used a touchpad for a long time and never managed to get it to paste anything. I didn't even know I could get it to emit a middle-click! I'm not saying this is a non-issue, just that I think you are overestimating the number of people affected by it. > Solution: > Middle-mouse pasting would be great as a setting that can be > enabled/disabled by 'xset' on the command line. As far as I know, Xorg doesn't ascribe any special behaviour to the middle mouse button, and leaves it up to applications themselves. Middle-click pasting has become a defacto standard, with every application implementing this independently. This means that I don't think there is a way you can completely disable middle-click pasting, other than configuring every program that uses it to stop doing it, using whatever way they decided to do it when they implemented their custom middle-button event handler. For toolkits like GTK you can probably toggle it in one place and affect a whole bunch of programs, but it looks like it will always require individual programs to be configured manually. > I would bet that desktop linux distros would disable middle-mouse > pasting by default, if they could. They already can for many applications but they don't because so many people like this feature. Firefox disabled opening URLs on a middle-click by default for example, but it's one of the first options I go in and turn back on when using a fresh install because it's so convenient. > Many users are new to Linux, and are used to absent-mindedly clicking > the scroll wheel while scrolling. > Hardcore coders can always re-enable the feature via 'xset'. They will soon learn to stop this behaviour :) Linux is and always has been aimed at very technical people, so if you start dumbing it down for the masses you will get a lot of criticism. People switch to Linux precisely because it doesn't treat you like a simpleton, and sure most people will tell you the transition was hard and there was a huge amount to learn, but now they've gotten used to it they appreciate why things are the way they are. It might be tough to kick your idle middle-clicking habit, but if you can do it, you'll eventually wonder how you ever managed without middle-click pasting! Cheers, Adam. _______________________________________________ xorg@lists.x.org: X.Org support Archives: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg Info: https://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg Your subscription address: %(user_address)s